Leon Panetta reacts to CIA-Senate flap

Former Central Intelligence Agency Director Leon Panetta said Tuesday that he’s disappointed with the dispute that has erupted in which senators are accusing the agency of subverting congressional oversight by snooping on computers used by Senate Intelligence Committee staffers.

In a brief interview, Panetta said that the information at the core of the showdown — a report prepared by a CIA task force on Bush-era interrogation practices — was never supposed to be a comprehensive review of whether such methods were successful or proper.

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Instead, the group’s work was largely to catalog and analyze records being provided to Senate investigators, Panetta told POLITICO. “Basically, it was just looking at the material that was being provided to the Hill. There wasn’t any kind of formal study. They call it ‘the Panetta review,’ but it wasn’t a formal study,” he said.

In an extraordinary Senate floor speech Tuesday, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein accused the CIA of snooping on computers Senate staffers used while reviewing agency documents. She also acknowledged that those aides took a copy of a key report from a secure CIA facility and moved it to a secure Senate repository, without submitting to an agreed review by the agency.

Both incidents were referred to the Justice Department for investigation, Feinstein said, though a spokesman there would not discuss the status of any investigation into the matters.

Current CIA Director John Brennan denied claims of “hacking into Senate computers,” but said he couldn’t comment further on the episode because of the ongoing investigations.

Asked if he was disappointed that the CIA and its Senate overseers are engaged in a highly-public fight, Panetta replied:”I am. I am. I wish they’d work together because ultimately we ought to be focusing on the threats of today, not the past.”

Panetta, who served as CIA director from 2009 to 2011, made the comments after delivering a speech Tuesday in Washington to a cybersecurity conference, the Fedscoop Symantec Government Symposium.